ah yes... tale as old as time... song as old as rhyme... i decide to write a short warmup piece before getting back to my main fic, and i tell myself 'this will be no more than 1k words,' and then it turns out over twice that length.

classic

also, possible trigger warning for self-harm here. it's not really about that, but Adrenaline Junkie Ginny does have a complicated relationship with pain and self-preservation.

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By the time her Hogwarts letter arrived, Ginny Weasley had nearly died six times already.

She was one of those children—the kind who wore bruises from everyday wear and tear like they'd been fingerpainted. Something in her thin and nearly translucent skin made her susceptible, probably—or maybe it was an issue of sheer physical proximity. The Burrow overlapped on itself, all its elements colliding endlessly like pelagic cross-currents. Even as a twig of a child, Ginny was always clipping herself on counters, doors left ajar, chairs left askew, wood for the fireplace, Fred and George's experiments, half-full cauldrons, et cetera.

The six near-deaths, in no particular order: two falls from broomsticks; a violent bout of Kneazle Pox; an unintentional whack on the head by a frying pan held by a gesticulating Percy; the backfiring of an old wand; and, of course, the drinking of a potion designed for scouring stubborn stains from glass. This last was the most serious. Ginny was ten. Two hours after the incident, Molly Weasley had a shouting match with a Poisons Specialist at St. Mungo's who had the temerity to suggest she should have been looking after her daughter more closely.

"And I suppose one of you—" Mrs. Weasley snarled, rounding on her sons, once the Healer had scurried, terrified, from the ward— "dared her to do it, did you? Did you?"

All six broke into protests. "Mother," blustered Percy, "you don't really believe that I would encourage—"

"We'd never—" said Fred—

"—ever—" said George—

"I told her to stop!" Ron protested.

"We're not twelve years old, Mum," said Charlie, arms crossed, beside an equally indignant Bill.

Molly Weasley's eyes narrowed to slits, and she leaned forward. All six boys leaned backward.

"She did it on her own, Mum," Fred said.

"And why would she do that?"

Six shrugged shoulders. Molly looked to Bill, the most even-headed of the family, their anchor.

"It's true," Bill said. "She said, 'Look at this,' and then she was doing it."

They turned as one to the girl in the bed. She was asleep. Ginny was scraped elbows and a sunburned face and bruises on her knuckles from where she'd drummed them insistently on the table. She was the picture of exposure, of involvement, of the refusal to withdraw. She would not go through life unmarked.

Ginny didn't think Hogwarts would be different. She didn't want it to be. She had no interest in a different world than the one she'd somehow punched her way into—a world where she was, at all times, on the brink of something that might mean permanent alteration. This was the feeling of Chasing, and of being alive: hurtling forward, tackling in midair, risking freefall and immediate vascular rupture, nose bloodied from where it had crunched into someone's shoulder, always about to fling something into the wind—caution? self-preservation?—because that was the only way to achieve a goal.

So, the evening she met Luna Lovegood, of course she'd fractured her tibia. And twisted her ankle. Also possibly sprained her left wrist, though it was difficult to tell, because pain was referring across her body like sound echoing through a mountain range. All she knew was that George's Comet 260 had taken a turn at half-field with a bit too much drag to the tail end, and suddenly she was rocketing over the handle with a scream that sounded nearly like a laugh, and she fell twenty feet and struck field, plowed right the fuck into the dirt, and then she was lying very still on the ground, no air left in her.

Ginny tried to stand and couldn't. "Fuck," she said, and then she yelled it, for good measure. If Hooch came down and saw her here, not only having nicked George's broom from the team storage areas but also having nearly killed herself, she'd write to Mum, and the resultant Howler would probably give her an eardrum injury to add to the pile.

Lying there on the field, she started to laugh. The evening was rolling over the Hogwarts grounds like mist, softening everything. That was when she saw a ghostly figure drifting onto the field.

She was like a mirage, the girl, with her long straggly hair and her round face, her wide pale eyes glowing out of the gloaming like lights.

The first words she said were, "Does it hurt very much?"

An agonized laugh came out of Ginny. "Yeah. Yeah, it does, thanks. You're Luna, right?"

"Yes, that's right." Luna only seemed slightly perturbed. She looked back toward Hogwarts, and then to Ginny. Instead of trying to help Ginny up, she sat down beside her. She didn't crouch, didn't kneel, nothing with the expectation of further action, just sat. Ginny, nearly delirious with pain, stared up at her face. She looked like a gibbous moon. She looked like a silver coin in a dark pool.

"What do you think?" Luna said. "Better to try and do something ourselves, or better to go and fetch Madam Pomfrey? I don't think I'd like to be left alone if it were me, but it's not me, so, what do you think, Ginny."

"I think you're," Ginny said, dazed, breathing hard. Mad? Something else?

"Let's see. May I see?"

"Yeah," Ginny said roughly. "Sure."

Luna tugged up Ginny's robes to see the ankle and the tibia in question. The only change in her expression was a slow, hesitant blink, the gradual unfolding of tissue-thin eyelids, in which Ginny could see every delicate vein, over those expansive grey eyes.

"How did you do it?" Luna asked.

"Trying a Rivka Defensive Block," Ginny said. "I'll get it eventually."

Luna nodded, considering. "Well," she said, standing, "I don't think there's much I can do, unfortunately. I'd conjure a transport, but I can't do that kind of conjuration yet. Unless you can?"

"No."

"I'll fetch Madam Pomfrey, then."

Hogwarts was not a large school, and Ginny saw her often after that. Ginny soon realized that her first instinct—that Luna looked like the moon—had been incorrect. Luna was, obviously, a misnomer. She was staid and unchanging; she had no phases. She had an identical ratio of composure to raggedness every time Ginny saw her: in double Transfiguration, or outside on the lawns, or studying under an orb of light she'd conjured in the corner of the library. Luna made Ginny acutely aware of the way the world tore at her own body, because Luna seemed to drift out of its reach, always untouched.

"Hey, Luna," she'd say, coming up to disturb her, wanting to make an impact, but she never did. Luna would never startle, or laugh at a joke. When Ginny approached, she would look up, as unperturbed as she'd been that night on the pitch. Then she would look Ginny over and point out something she'd perceived, speaking very mildly; always she'd do that. It became a ritual.

"Quidditch?" she asked in third year, about a scrape on Ginny's arm.

"Potions?" she asked in fourth year, about a red raised welt where Ginny had burned herself on her cauldron.

"Dean Thomas?" she asked in fifth, when Ginny hadn't cast the concealment charm quite strongly enough on the love bite on her neck, just below her jaw.

"How do you always know?" Ginny said, grinning. "Budge up." And she settled in the roots of the birch tree beside Luna as Luna smiled. She thought Luna's cheeks were slightly pink, but the color was gone so quickly, leaving her as pale as frost, that Ginny thought she'd probably imagined it.

Sixth year, Ginny staggered out of a detention shaking and sweaty. It was Saturday afternoon and the Carrows had kept her for hours, but she'd distracted them from catching Neville last week, so it was all right.

She couldn't even make it up the steps out of the dungeons. She collapsed on the stairs, waiting for her body to stop shaking.

A figure appeared at the top of the steps. Then Luna was at her side. She didn't kneel, she didn't crouch, she didn't fuss. She sat on the steps.

Ginny looked up at her, breathing hard, and cracked a twitchy smile, her facial muscles still slightly out of control. "Well?" she said. "What do you think?"

She hadn't even finished speaking when Luna leaned close to her and cupped Ginny's face in her hands. Ginny's body flooded with strange chills. Luna's hands were cool and dry as if she were made of parchment, and Ginny thought about the heat and sweat that were coming from her body onto Luna's, bleeding some of the way she was into her. She looked at Luna's small soft mouth, the line of her jaw, her nearly invisible eyebrows that feathered over her browbones.

"Do you have to do this?" Luna whispered.

Ginny thought, for the first time in years, of the bitter taste of the potion she'd drank at age ten. Look at this, she'd said, grinning at her brothers. There was nothing then but to impress, and to shock, and to veer off the roads of the life that had been assigned to her, into something that was wild and her own. Luna's path, though unusual and untrodden by most, was still safe; the Carrows still hadn't touched her, hadn't managed to catch her at anything.

Ginny thought it might not be so bad to be safe, but it wasn't for her. It never would be.

"I can't stop," she said.

They took Luna two months later. Three Death Eaters forced their way into their compartment on the Hogwarts Express. Ginny, Luna, and Neville were on their feet at once, wands drawn, but before they could cast, Ginny and Neville were flying backward, pinned to the wall. Ginny let out a half-yell through the Binding Hex as they struck Luna to the ground, as they bound her feebly stirring body, as they wrangled her upright and backward out of the compartment.

There was blood on Luna's face. Blood moving in a line down her cheek. It was so wrong that it made Ginny feel sick, the disruption. Her eyes were half-open. She was looking at Ginny, and Ginny tried to scream, to yell, as they dragged her away.

Spring was restless. Ginny was stuck at the Burrow after Ron was spotted on the run. She and Charlie and Fred and George and their parents were all there, moving and shifting on top of each other. Ginny paced the garden and got splinters in her palms from climbing the tree. She wanted to fly, to move, and when the summons came for the Battle, for the final return to Hogwarts, she felt as if she could breathe for the first time in six months. Coming out into the chaos, wand clutched in her hand, she was alive again.

She was at the top of a stairwell, the castle shaking with bombardment, an hour into the fighting, when the Cutting Hex struck her.

The impact flung Ginny across the hallway and into the wall. Her head cracked against the stone. She flung her arms out as she slid down onto the ground. She was bleeding hard from the shoulder, where the hex had hit, and she thought she was probably concussed. She groped around for her wand, which had come out of her fingers, but couldn't find it.

The Death Eater had slowed in his approach. He was stalking toward her, his wand held lightly in his hand. He said something about blood traitors, something mocking that Ginny didn't hear, or if the words struck her eardrums, they came through mistranslated into her mind, and anyway, him doing some sort of tragically unoriginal monologue at this moment seemed very funny to her, somehow. A lifetime of dancing around the veil … naturally she would pass through it before all this was over, but did it have to be this idiot?

Ginny started to laugh. The Death Eater stopped walking. He was speaking angrily now, growling or snarling something. She laughed harder, clutching at her bleeding shoulder. She was going to die. She had pushed it too far, chased too hard after the feeling. Luna had been right, after all. Luna. Luna … Ginny thought of her face in the evening half-light, like a gibbous moon.

The man lifted his wand.

A jet of light lanced up the steps from a great distance, a miraculous shot of magic aimed with a Chaser's precision, which struck the Death Eater in the neck. He flew backward, immobilized.

And then she was there, moving toward Ginny. Luna. Miraculous and light on her feet. Her hair was no more disheveled than usual and she looked untouched. Ginny gazed up at her, concussed, remembering the delirium of their first meeting, feeling it all over again. Maybe every time she'd seen her it had been delirium.

Luna sat beside her. The icy feeling of a poultice conjured onto her shoulder. Luna looked at the wound, at the sweat trickling down Ginny's face, at her fingers, which were twitching upon the stone steps. Even now her face was calm. "Does it hurt very much?" she whispered.

"Touch it," Ginny murmured back.

A moment's hesitation. Then Luna let her wand clatter gently to the floor. She reached out with steady hands and ghosted her fingertips over Ginny's shoulder. She slid her cool papery hands against Ginny's cut cheek, her burned neck, her tired wrists, all the soreness in her body. Ginny closed her eyes and focused on Luna's touch, but she couldn't be calmed by it, only agitated. More, she thought, more. She moved, her shoulder aflame, the pain coming all through her like floodwaters bursting a dam, and she staggered upward, catching Luna around the waist as she did, holding onto her, propelling them both to their feet. Unsteady, she turned Luna to the wall and lifted Luna's chin with a shaking hand and kissed her. Ginny's lip had been split in the fighting and it came open immediately, but she couldn't stop. She felt Luna melt, for a moment, back into the wall, and then Luna was shaking, kissing her back, sliding one hand up from the back of her neck into her hair, clinging onto her. When Ginny broke back from her, breathing hard, Luna's face was as she'd never seen it. The unshakable had been shaken, rattled, split all the way open. Luna was blinking hard, staring up into Ginny's eyes. Her expression was quivering and ecstatic and between so many things at once that it might have meant nothing, but Ginny knew what it meant.

Luna kissed her, and this time it was a Luna kiss, a soft light thing like a moth's wing to the lip, like a drizzle of rain to the inside of the wrist. She tasted like rock dust. She kissed Ginny's neck, her jaw, her earlobe.

Ginny leaned forward and took Luna's lip between her teeth, and Luna tensed, made a sound. Ginny let go, but didn't draw away. They were a millimeter apart. "Does it hurt?" she whispered.

"Yes," Luna said, strangled. "Don't stop."

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thanks for reading! reviews always make my day. :)

hugs,
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